[lorean_victor]

I wouldn't characterise the history of the internet as having started with "everything decentralised". if I'm not missing something, it was completely the other way around.

introduction of general populous to the internet was through internet gatekeepers like aol or msn, with unimaginable convenience (and centralisation). that convenience lost, in the end, to the world wide web, where a ton of single individuals could set up a website and reach other people across the internet. some of the big central giants of today got born out of this transition (and some were instrumental to it, namely google).

something similar happened to smartphones. ios was intended to be a closed off gatekeeper. people jailbroke it, and apple caved in and opened the system up, allowing anyone to provide services (apps) on it. similar to the www transition, we had a period were you could easily find popular apps made by a single programmer. this decentralisation also basically enabled most centralised social and messaging services of today.

so I see it more as a cycle: in stable times, convenience causes a drift towards further centralisation. when there is a platform shift, established players lose their defensive power, some essential operational costs drop drastically, resulting in a sudden decentralisation: tons of small (mostly individual) players can now enter the market and gain prominence through it. the market then stabilises, thriving players shrink in number and grow in size, and become the convenient, centralised corps of the future, only to be similarly shaken by market forces that allowed them to exist in the first place.

are we close to such a shift now? I think so. current version of the internet is clearly starting to rot and drown in noise, while we are the cusp of new heights of information processing and accessibility through LLMs, while also thriving to push the boundaries of the information we circulate (AR/VR). but who knows.

[sedatk]

I mean, yes, you're missing something, the first and foremost, Internet. :) Its sole purpose was to solve the information access problem in a decentralized way. That was the rationale behind the ARPANET project.

Then, DNS came, which is also a decentralized solution to the name resolution problem. BGP routing is also similarly decentralized. World Wide Web itself is decentralized. IRC is decentralized. These technologies predate almost everything you mentioned.

I agree with your sentiment that it's mostly a cycle. I just wanted to emphasize that decentralization had never been a novel idea. We've always had decentralization, it's not like a new revolutionary thing as it's presented. That's my point.

[lorean_victor]

tbf I mentioned the www era decentralisation mostly.

but I agree. as mentioned earlier, actually the fact that decentralisation has happened multiple times before, while convenience was kind of against it, is the reason I think it will most definitely happen again as well. I'm even assuming it won't be far off by considering similarities in some respects to the situation before two other large-scale decentralisations we've observed (www and apps), though of course that is the same as predicting when the next platform shift will occur and that's not someone can claim with meaningful precision, IMO.